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Only Time Will Tell - Amarok 2.0.2 released

March 5, 2009 - 16:29 — nightrose

The Amarok team is proud to bring you Amarok 2.0.2, codenamed "Only Time Will Tell". It is a stability update for the Amarok 2.0 series.

Our primary focus is on the upcoming 2.1 feature release, but we have fixed a number of the most critical and annoying bugs present in 2.0.1.1.
Get Amarok 2.0.2 while it is fresh, and keep Amarokin'. And remember, good things are on the way! Check our blogs for updates.

Changes

Show a statusbar message when loving a lastfm track.

Show error message when Wikipedia information cannot be retrieved.

Bugfixes

Fix showing of book information from the LibriVox service.

Don't crash if a script has uncaught exceptions.

Open ogg files in Amarok when using Dolphin and other file managers.
Patch thanks to Lubos Lunak . (BR 180155)

Fix podcast episodes not ordered right because of incorrect parsing of
pubdate. (BR 181338)

Fix crash in tagdialog when editing tracks without an artist. (BR 183180)

Are they really? I couldn't find a single .tar.gz/.bz2 of an amarok 1.4.x release! Amarok 2 has *so many* regressions, I'd love to compile amarok 1 myself so I can use it again (Fedora >= 10 has no amarok 1 packages).

Things not working in amarok 2:
Frequent crashes/sound issues (maybe because of crappy pulseaudio? why oh why do all the major distributions use crappy useless laggy buggy pulseaudio?).
Downloaded podcast are often not marked as downloaded.
If you drag a downloaded podcast into the playlist you get the http:// stream added, not the downloaded file.
Informations about the podcast feeds and the individual podcasts aren't displayed anymore.
The wikipedia applet crappyly embeds the webpage.
The widget heights are not resizeable!!! Wtf?
No contextinfo to the currently playing song/album as already mentioned.
No way to download the preview mp3s/oggs of manatune (I had to patch amarok and write a plugin to regain similar functionality).
With my new widescreen monitor I actually like a table where all the meta info to the songs is side by side in several columns more than the way amarok 2 displays it.
etc.

Things that are nice and new in amarok 2:
Bookmark time.
Select a whole album by single click in the playlist.

Having that said, I still hope it will be possible to get rid of the middle column (since I don't need it) and to get something as in Amarok 1 on the left side (the info about what is currently being played is self explanatory but I also really loved the "music by the same artist" listing since it was great for some "Oh, that's what I want to hear atm" in a large collection).

Shortly put: Thanks for your hard work but also think about why people continue to flame Amarok v2. It's not only because they are bored but simply cause they loved your previous work (v1) and like stuff that is currently missing in v2 while getting forced stuff on themself they don't need / want (the notorious middle column). Just see it as a compliment in some strange way cause people actually care about your work :D

So, if you could make it a bit more configurable everyone would be happy & noone had a reason to flame ;)

You can get rid of it: just click and drag the resize handles together. However, resizing those two requires accurate clicking on the right handle, otherwise the middle one will just pop right out again...

speak for your self!
you all know that there is heavy development going on and amarok will gain all the features you need eventually...
2.0 rocks and is very beautiful.. i am looking forward using 2.1 2.2 and watch the 2.0 series to growup and again become the best music player in the whole free software world..

Congratz on the new release. Looking forward to 2.1.
Ignore the flamers, it's that whole "Don't do new things, just keep doing the same" mentality that keeps proprietary software sucking for the most part.
Thanks for all the effort you guys put into making this great piece of software :)

Ok, I REALLY gave a chance to Amarok 2, really.
But in this current form I cannot use it. RealPlayer, MediaPlayer, Amarok 1 (cannot use), VLC with playlist are all the players I use with satisfaction.

I expected from Amarok 2.0.2 some big fixes but those are _nothing_.
Librivox, OpenSolaris, Podcasts.... Argggh. I want to play MP3 files on Linux. Lots of them. Not 10 or 12. 4300!
Lyrics applet is awful, all the playing is slow etc etc. Amarok 1 doesn't work for me, either.

You said that you will port Amarok 1 3 times until KDE 4 will be ported. Hmmm, time to reconsider yourselves.

Amarok DOES play mp3s! You just need the engine to support it! It will prompt you to install MP3 support if you get it from a major distribution, otherwise just install the package "libxine1-ffmpeg" in your distro. Easy!

Yet another user blaming us for the stupid software patenting system ruining things for distributions, who have to ship without MP3 support built in! Wohoo! It is so wonderful to see... Oh wait, that's a lie ;)

As for lots of tracks, please, get a grip - Amarok 2 handles many more files in the playlist than the old one does, and if you really feel like sabotaging the design of the application, you will be able to set it up to resemble 1.4 more closely when 2.1 is released. So, please, do your research before making comments like this. Makes you and everybody else happier.

I can play MP3s with Amarok, I have no problem with that.
Just I have more thousand of them, but the new interface does not make it possible to handle my files in a comfortable way.
Compare the new interface to eg. RealPlayer's. Amarok can display 10-15 songs, RP can 30. Amarok shows Title, artist, album and length, RP title, artist, album, genre, rating, CD track, format, quality, file name. Without extra configuration! Much like Amarok 1.
Here is a screenshot: http://img172.imageshack.us/img172/4272/realplayer.png

I really not interested in what was metallica's second singer's name. I just want to play music. Amarok offers a lot of things but it takes the comfortable way of managing lots of audio files (not just MP3s).
I have been waiting for a bug fixing release and now: none of the fixed bugs were those I wanted to see. Librivox or Podcasts or Solaris: I simply don't use them. The basepillars left untouched and most of the problems exist are with them.

I reported lots of bugs to the bug tracker (so I really wanted to help) but I found sooo much, I gave up. Maybe a half year later.

@szotsaki
If something else suits your needs, fine - use it! But I have no troubles with amarok2. All my files play fine and even though it is missing some features yet, stability hasn't been an issue at all for me.

> I can't really see nothing wrong with it. The last word on the choices is up to the authors. We're not "customers" and Amarok is not a "product"...

Of *course* such choices are up to the developers. But all too often, "Go code it yourself" means "I'm not discussing this feature request (or whatever) with any other developers, nor any other prospective developers"; it's incredibly arrogant and deluded to expect that everyone who wants the features are willing and able to implement them, but it is *not* so arrogant and deluded to expect that there's *someone* out there who can do that thing. Rejecting the ideas right off the bat results in a lot of wasted time because people didn't even know that some people want something done. This could happen: Someone brings up feature requests, nothing happens because the devs reject the idea; three years later, someone *else* comes up with a feature request, nothing happens either; three years still, someone thinks "why the hell this program doesn't have this feature when it'd *obviously* make the program much better, I'll go code it myself". Nine years, and hey presto, we've got functionality.

The lesson learned: Don't reject clearly feasible feature requests. It's better to have a 9-year-old open feature request ticket in your Bugzilla, than sixteen saying the exact same thing and all tagged WONTFIX. Gauge the popularity of the requests: if a feature request gets five bazillion Bugzilla votes, it might not be a good idea to put all energy in your new pet ideas.

Excuse me? Every person who wants to collaborate is welcome of course!

We have to cope with people who come with feature request and "oh that should be easy to implement, why haven't you done yet?", but on further enquiry it turns out they have no idea about coding or never ever looked at the code at all. Also, the Amarok developers work as a team and decide as a team, so if a feature is rejected by the majority of the developers, there is some good reason behind it.

Then, just FYI, there are tons of new features already in 2.1-svn by now, and certainly a lot of other features in the various personal git branches of the developers, just waiting to be polished enough to find their way in the codebase. And, of course, there are also tons of features not implemented (yet?), but guess what, the day only has 24 hours and even our developers need some sleep.

BTW, Windows and OS X developers out there: we could need some help, we simply don't have enough manpower to have those version as advanced as the Linux version.

Im really not sure why people have been having problems with this player it looks and works great. I have used lots of different builds, everything from pre built binaries, to compiling it myself to be bleeding edge. I use it on various distros, mainly gentoo, mac os x, and windows at my work. Everyone who sees it asks me where they can get it. If only there was solid support on os x to use my ipod. Future work, and not for you guys. My favorite feature, ampache plug in. Thanks a bunch for your hard work.

Sticking with 1.4 at the moment, but with the functionality of the packages currently in Debian experimental I could live with, so I'm about 98% sure 2.1 will hit the tipping point where I move off 1.4 permanently.

If I can figure out how to get my playlist from 1.4 to 2.x, that would help. ;)

Seriously. It is a *BUGFIX* release, and clearly labeled as such. We have a ton of new features in trunk already for 2.1.0, but since it will be a few month before this is ready for release, we wanted to do a small release to fix some annoying bugs.

I just installed KDE 4 and Amarok 2. And I found that amarok 2 is simply going in the wrong direction.
The "context view" has become the "central view". The amazing playlist of amarok 1.4 has been trashed. I'm happy to see that's integrated with phonon framework, that has been ported to Qt4, etc, but I think that *the whole amarok 2* isn't good.
Look at the screenshot (yep, because I'm talking about usability). Why the score/rating is displayed in the context view? It's a song property (also because we have a semantic desktop, now. With rating for every file...) and sorting a playlist using the rating is a sensed thing. Removed.
Amarok has well-known shortcuts for simple usage: meta-[zxcvb] for prev, play, pause, stop, next. Why? Because it's a player meant to be "hidden": you set the playlist, hide it, then use keyboard shortcuts because you don't want to see the window again. So, why is the context view so important, in amarok 2? It's an inconsistent behavior. It's not a karaoke player. Why should i care about having the lyrics? Wanna the lyrics? There were plugins in 1.4 and they worked quite well. I'm happy about better network-services integration, but it's done in the wrong way (of course, for my usability concepts)... But if i take a look to iTunes, songbird, rhythmbox, the Listen project... They are all in the same direction, and i think that amarok 2 lost the target.
My opinion, of course... If users are happy with it, good for them. I'll switch to a better one (since there isn't a amarok 1.4-kde4 enabled) for my needs and my personal use case.

The playlist of the Amarok 1.x was very good, but there is not option to bring it again in Amarok 2. And the Amarok 2's playlist is very confuse, because if you to listen musics from different artists, the picture album from each music appear in the playlist. The playlist should show only the musics information, nothing more, imho.

Oh, and I'm not saying that amarok developers don't work or that too much time has passed since last release or that upcoming features won't satisfy my needs.... But it seems that "amarok 2 is an improvement in usability", well I just think it isn't.
Not being satisfied doesn't mean I don't respect their work: means only that I'd taken a different path (or, if their path isn't changed, just different priorities).

Is there a roadmap for 2.1 somewhere? I've been using 2.0 for a while from the kubuntu ppa repository and it seems okay, but I would like to know when a few features I miss badly will reappear:

* the ability to drag files / playlists etc. from Amarok to Dolphin (or other applications). Amarok is a great music manager and player but to assume I will never want to use any of my music elsewhere seems a bit arrogant. (You can't even drag tracks from the playlist to the file sidebar within Amarok!)

* generic mass storage mp3 player support. Especially when combined with the previous missing feature this is really crippling, as it seems to mean that there is currently no way for me to put together a playlist in Amarok and then transfer it to my mp3 player for use in the car.

I'm not trying to troll as in many regards Amarok 2 is a great player: phonon support, better collection management, some promising plasmoids - but it still seems like KDE 4.0 did. While I know there is a list of proposed features, as development progresses it would be good to know whether these will make it into 4.1.0 (or maybe even maintenance 4.0 releases?)

Anyway, I have a question:
Currently you can PLAY music from your mtp device, which is great (especially the collection aside the "Local Collection"). COPYING FROM your device is also possible. The problem is that COPYING TO your mtp device is not possible at the moment (or am I too stupid to find it?)